Mon front est rouge encor du baiser de la reine.
J’ai rêvé dans la grotte où nage la Sirène,
Et j’ai deux fois vainqueur traversé l’Achéron,
Modulant tour à tour sur la lyre d’Orphée,
Les soupris de la sainte et les cris de la fée.
GERARD DE NERVAL.
De Nerval’s is an incantation of the “A-kid-I-fell-into-the-milk” variety. His magic, like Darley’s, is the magic of symbols and allusions—only the symbols are more esoteric than Darley’s straightforward Phoenix, the allusions are not to a philosophy but to events in the private life, perhaps even in the dream life, of the poet. Darley only suffered from a soul-disfiguring stammer. Nerval was eccentric to the point of occasional madness. He ended his life hanging from a lamp-post. We divine in the obscure, private magic of the poem its author’s suicidal loneliness and isolation. The Surréalistes, and all those who, without calling themselves by that name conform more or less completely to surréaliste practice, have methodized Nerval’s madness. The impenetrable magic of private allusion and dream symbol—this is their classical style.
Gaze not on swans in whose soft breast
A full-hatched beauty seems to nest,
Nor snow which, falling from the sky,
Hovers in its virginity.
Gaze not on roses, though new-blown,
Graced with a fresh complexion,
Nor lilies which no subtle bee
Hath robbed by kissing-chemistry.
For if my emperess appears,
Swans moulting die, snow melts to tears,
Roses do blush and hang their heads,
Pale lilies shrink into their beds.
So have I seen stars big with light
Prove lanterns to the moon-eyed night.
Which, when Sol’s rays were once displayed,
Sank in their sockets and decayed.
HENRY NOEL.
Mere lusciousness of sensuous imagery is magical. Pleasurable sensations are supernatural in the sense that they are beyond reason, cannot be analysed, or explained, or described—only experienced and then named. The pleasures of looking at a swan and stroking its feathers are as incommunicable as the mystic vision. Poetry that effectively reminds us of such pleasures partakes of their supernatural quality, their magicalness. Thanks to the sumptuous shape of swans and the softness of their plumes, and thanks to the skill with which the poet has rendered this splendour and deliciousness, the first stanza of Henry Noel’s little poem is genuinely magical. It tails off, as it proceeds, into agreeable but unexciting ordinariness.
The drunkard now supinely snores,
His load of ale sweats through his pores;
Yet when he wakes, the swine shall find
A crapula remains behind.
CHARLES COTTON.
Why is this quatrain so admirable? Simply and solely because of the crapula in line four. The word is magical. Partly on account of its unfamiliarity. (The Americans who, since Prohibition, have developed so copious and expressive a vocabulary to describe the various phases of alcoholic intoxication, have overlooked “crapula.” I recommend it to their attention.) Partly because it makes such an admirable noise. To be magical, unfamiliarity must be sonorous. The magic of “crapula” conjures up visions of a thoroughly disgusting lowness. It reminds us of creeping, of the American game with dice, of the verb to crap—derived from it, no doubt,—of the popular press and the Papuan islanders, of crape and Crippen. A man with a crapula is manifestly and unquestionably a swine. The magicalness of single words varies in different countries. In English ears, for example, “Rozanov” has a most poetical sound. But Rozanov himself was constantly complaining of his misfortune in being burdened with so grotesque a name. And in Dostoevsky’s Possessed there is evidently nothing specially ludicrous about the name of the old gentleman whom Stavrogin led by the nose. But for French and English readers Mr. Gaganov is the last word in absurdity. The rules of the literary Black Art are without universal validity; each language has its own.
Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
There shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
No rays from the holy heaven come down
On the long night-time of that town:
But light from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrets silently—
Gleams up the pinnacles far and free—
Up domes, up spires, up kingly halls,
Up fanes, up Babylon-like walls,
Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers
Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers,
Up many and many a marvellous shrine
Whose wreathèd friezes intertwine
The viol, the violet and the vine.
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
So blend the turrets and shadows there,
That all seem pendulous in air,
While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.
There open fanes and gaping graves
Yawn level with the luminous waves:
But not the riches there that lie
In each idol’s diamond eye—
Not the gaily-jewelled dead
Tempt the waters from their bed:
For no ripples curl, alas!
Along that wilderness of glass—
No swellings tell that winds may be
Upon some far-off happier sea—
No heavings hint that winds have been
On seas less hideously serene.
But lo, a stir is in the air!
The wave—there is a movement there!
As if the towers had thrust aside,
In slightly sinking, the dull tide—
As if their tops had feebly given
A void within the filmy heaven.
The waves have now a redder glow,
The hours are breathing faint and low;
And when, amid no earthly moans,
Down, down that town shall settle hence,
Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,
Shall do it reverence.
EDGAR ALLAN POE.
All the poems of Edgar Allan Poe are spells. A self-conscious and scientific sorcerer, he was for ever experimentally combining in varying proportions the different kinds of poetical magic—magic of sound, magic of obscure allusions and private symbol, magic of remoteness and fanciful extravagance. The results are seldom entirely successful. He laid on the magic too thick, and when spells are too abracadabrical, they do not work. This “City in the Sea” is one of the few really admirable poems which Poe ever wrote. It is genuinely magical because its author has been so sparing of his magics.
Music and Poetry
The images, in terms of which poets have tried to render music—here is subject-matter for a most instructive thesis. It will not, alas, be written by me; my own burrowings into literature have been too unsystematic to allow me to undertake such a labour. The most I can do is to hint at the way such a thesis might be written—to suggest provisionally, on the strength of my small knowledge of the subject, the sort of way in which a person who knew it thoroughly might organize his material. Music, then, has been rendered in poetry either by onomatopœic means, or else by means of images themselves non-musical. Of the onomatopœic means I need hardly speak. Very little can be done with mere noise. Browning’s “Bang-whang-whang goes the drum, tootle-te-tootle the fife,” does not, and is not meant to, give more than a perfunctorily comic rendering of the music of a band. Alliterative effects, like “the moan of doves in immemorial elms, the murmur of innumerable bees” are better, but do not go very far and will not stand frequent repetition. In order to express music in terms of their art, poets have had for the most part to rely on intrinsically non-musical images. These images, so far as my knowledge of the subject goes, always belong to one of three classes. The first, in terms of which poets express the quality of music and of the feelings which it rouses, is the class of purely sensuous images—most often of touch, but frequently also of sight, taste and smell. Here, to illustrate my point, are three poetical renderings of music by Strode, Herrick and Milton respectively.
O lull me, lull me, charming air!
My senses rock with wonder sweet;
Like snow on wool thy fallings are;
Soft like a spirit’s are thy feet.
Grief who needs fear
That hath an ear?
Down let him lie
And slumbering die,
And change his soul for harmony.
WILLIAM STRODE.
So smooth, so sweet, so silvery is thy voice,
As, could they hear, the damned would make no noise,
But listen to thee (walking in thy chamber)
Melting melodious words, to lutes of amber.
ROBERT HERRICK.
Can any mortal mixture of earth’s mould
Breathe such divine enchanting ravishment?
Sure something holy lodges in that breast,
And with these raptures moves the vocal air
To testify his hidden residence.
How sweetly did they float upon the wings
Of silence, through the empty-vaulted night,
At every fall smoothing the raven down
Of darkness till it smiled! I have oft heard
My mother Circe with the Sirens three,
Amidst the flowery-kirtled Naïades,
Culling their potent herbs and baleful drugs,
Who, as they sung, would take the prisoned soul,
And lap it in Elysium: Scylla wept,
And chid her barking waves into attention,
And fell Charybdis murmured soft applause.
Yet they in pleasing slumber lulled the sense,
And in sweet madness robbed it of itself;
But such a sacred and home-felt delight,
Such sober certainty of waking bliss,
I never heard till now.
JOHN MILTON.
Strode uses images of touch. Nothing could be softer than snow on wool unless it is a spirit’s feet. Herrick mingles touch with taste and sight. The voice is smooth, sweet and silvery. The words melt—in the mouth, under the hand—and the sounds of the lute have the golden translucency of amber. Milton renders his music in terms of touch. Feathers replace the wool and snow of Strode—feathers, equally soft, but more glossy. The fingers slide, caressed and caressing;
At every fall smoothing the raven down
Of darkness till it smiled.
How delicately voluptuous against the hand—against the cheek and lips—is that smooth dark touch of feathers! And (miracle!) how near we are to music!
Crashaw’s poem on the musical duel between a lutanist and a nightingale is a mine of such purely sensuous images.
She measures every measure, everywhere
Meets art with art; sometimes as if in doubt,
Not perfect yet, and fearing to be out,
Trails her plain ditty in one long-spun note
Through the sleek passage of her
